–>
Let’s say that what you wanted in a car was really a truck, but it had to have car-like attributes and be ultra-comfy and quiet and not really say out loud that it’s a truck…. just whisper it. This is what we call an SUV, but most SUVs have really become cars that are a bit higher than a normal car, but are still cars. They lost their spurs, they abandoned their boots (if they ever had them.)

Enter Lexus, which just happens to be still selling a couple of muscular SUVs that, while loaded up with the full complement of luxury goodies, will still get you down through the gullies and over the hill.

One of them is today’s road tester, the 2015 Lexus GX460. The conundrum is that it almost seems like a car/truck that was built to spend a lot of its life

Warning! Don’t try to suck the folks at Mecum Auctions into the woe-is-us, the-sky-is-falling-on-the-collector-car-hobby talk that’s fomenting within the industry these days.

Sure, Mecum president Dave Magers will agree that at the top end of the market, that portion that floats above the million-dollar sea level and thus is most visible to observers, things appear flat if not in a degree of decline. But, adds Frank Mecum, son of auction house founder Dana Mecum, “our niche is a little different.”

Dana Mecum holds a ‘sold’ sticker that he’ll apply to this vintage 1950s Thunderbird’s windshield as soon as he hears the sound of the auctioneer’s hammer signaling another sale

Mecum’s niche focuses on cars from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, on muscle cars, on Corvettes, Camaros and Mustangs and the like, Frank added during an early morning chat at the company’s Kissimmee, Florida, auction.

This 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk is far more ridiculous than any supercharged version of the Charger or Challenger, even the 840-horsepower Demon. The natural progression of a muscle car like the Challenger implies that as time goes on, it’ll get more and more power to keep interest alive. SRT becomes Hellcat. Hellcat becomes Demon. With each new up-tune, the Challenger – now over a decade old – is instantly relevant again. What’s next? Either the end of the road, or, uh, Helldemon? (I hope it’s Helldemon.)

In December 2015, a new leg of the RCMP’s E-Pirate money-laundering investigation delved into Metro Vancouver’s underworld of fentanyl labs, gun sales and violent dial-a-dope gangs.

It started with undercover officers tracking the movements of a Burnaby man named Ge ‘Gary’ Wang.

The offshoot investigation, code-named Prophet, grew from extensive surveillance of the many alleged employees of E-Pirate’s primary target, Paul King Pao Jin. In E-Pirate, the RCMP and B.C. government documents allege a network of organized criminals established a massive underground banking channel between Richmond and Mainland China, using VIP gamblers from Macau to buy chips, mostly at River Rock Casino, in order to launder hundreds of millions in drug cash. The operation allowed ultra-wealthy Chinese businessmen, some allegedly with ties to organized crime, to move money from China to Canada while evading China’s tight capital export controls.